Merry Christmas and happy new year everybody. I’ve been back to Vancouver for several days. These days, I’m updating this blog FIRSTLY written in September 2019. 2020 is coming, and we’re getting 1 year older. A kind of sad hum?
Okay… No matter what, let’s enjoy the song first: WE ARE YOUNG. Today, I joined Free Software Foundation and start my journey of supporting Open Source Software BY CASH. For me, it’s not about poverity or richness. It’s ALL about FAITH.
To write something about Raspberry Pi is to say GOOD BYE to my Raspberry Pi 3B, and WELCOME Raspberry Pi 4 at the same time. Our target today is to build an AI edge computing end as the following Youtube video:
1. About Raspberry Pi 4
1.1 Raspberry Pi 3B+ vs. Raspberry Pi 4
Before we start, let’s carry out a simple comparison between Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 3B+.
1.2 BCM2711 is detected as BCM2835
1 | ➜ ~ cat /proc/cpuinfo |
This issue seems to be a well-known bug. Raspberry Pi 4’s specification can be retrieved from The MagPi Magazine. More details about the development history of Raspberry Pi can be found on Wikipedia.
2. Movidius Neural Compute Stick on Raspberry Pi 4
Then, we just follow the following 2 blogs Run NCS Applications on Raspberry Pi and Adding AI to the Raspberry Pi with the Movidius Neural Compute Stick to utilize the outdated Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick:

Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick 1 is NOT listed on Intel’s official website any more. But github support for Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick 1 can be found at https://github.com/movidius/ncsdk.
2.1 NCSDK Installation
We FIRST need to have ncsdk installed. Yup, here, as described in Run NCS Applications on Raspberry Pi, we carry out the installation directly under folder ...../ncsdk/api/src.
1 | ➜ src git:(ncsdk2) ✗ make -j4 |
2.2 Test NCSDK Example Apps
1 | ➜ python hello_ncs.py |
2.3 mvnc Python Package
1 | pi@raspberrypi:~ $ python |
3. Transitioning from Intel Movidius Neural Compute SDK to Intel OpenVINO
By following Intel’s official documentation Transitioning from Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute SDK to Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit, we are transitioning to OpenVINO, which supports both Intel NCS 2 and the original NCS.
For the installation details of OpenVINO, please refer to the following 2 documentations:
- Install Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit for Linux*
- Raspberry Pi* 4 and Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2 Setup
In our case, we are testing out the MOST up-to-date l_openvino_toolkit_runtime_raspbian_p_2019.3.334.tgz.
4. ncappzoo
5. Additional Packages
5.1 Prerequisite Packages
Prerequisite:
For simplicity, you can grab the above three packages directly from Raspbian’s repository. However, it seems the default boost from Raspbian’s repository does NOT support python3 but ONLY python2. Therefore, in my case, I built boost 1.71, flann 1.9.1 and OpenCV 4.1.1 from sractch from source.
5.2 Build Caffe From Source
Then, we build Caffe 1 from source.

























